The Secret of Bryn Estyn: The Making of a Modern Witch Hunt [Paperback]

 

 

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For those people who believe that most of what we're told is wrong, Richard Webster's painstaking analysis of recent child abuse cases provides ammunition a-plenty.
His work provokes equal measures of worry and anger.

If he is to be beleved, and I think he is, several lawyers and journalists, and a succession of others in public life, have failed to do their work with sufficient detachment or regard for actual evidence.

His forensic examination of events in North Wales has shown the Waterhouse Inquiry has hidden the truth, allowed liars to go unpunished, and started a witch hunt among care workers and in childrens' homes.

It is a very sorry and salutary tale, which curiously, a number of well regarded journalists seem unable to acknowledge.

The Secret of Bryn Estyn, first published in 2005, is an indictment of the British press, judiciary, police and the chattering classes. The story represented the projection of the mythical into the public arena in the form of a moral panic. The story became a national scandal, paraded through the press whose peddling of pap was in itself a scandal of horrendous proportions. Fired by "superstitious secularism" - devised and subsequently discredited in North America - it found apologists such as the Marxist journalist Bea Campbell who proclaimed the existence of Satanic cults infiltrating whole communities. The damage done to the victims of such "crusading" journalism (snatched from loving homes by intellectually limited and professionally myopic social workers) was incalculable.

According to first reports Bryn Estyn was a network of evil - a paedophile ring whose members included a senior North Wales police officer and other public figures. Over a period of ten years thousands were accused and hundreds arrested using the now discredited system of police trawling which reversed the age old principle of innocent until proved guilty. As Webster made clear some allegations were made almost by police invitation. In many cases the motivation for the allegations was to make money. The alleged paedophile ring never existed. Just two men were convicted.

In 1999 the BBC broadcast a programme entitled A Place of Safety in which several former residents of Bryn Estyn made allegations against staff members. Yet all the accusers had left the institution before the accused staff members had joined and had never met them. At least five of the seven complainants had previously made allegations which had been proved to be manifestly false, yet their new allegations were uncritically accepted at face value.

Webster's complaint was that journalists, who should have pursued the truth, simply regurgitated falsehoods by neglecting their primary investigative duty. Facts were no longer sacred, opinion became "truth" and the journalists and false accusers received public awards which some, to their shame, have never acknowledged were bought at the expense of public trust and personal integrity. The recent case of alleged child abuse on Jersey shows the lesson has still not been learned and, meanwhile, the innocent remain in jail.

Webster never denied that some abuse took place. Indeed, he was relentless in his pursuit of the truth, identifying flaws in the police and public case against care workers, which transformed many baseless accusations into prosecutions by means of tactics worthy of a police state, in which the rules of normal justice were abandoned in order to "get a result". False allegations were effectively encouraged and believed by those who had the intelligence to know better but lacked the capacity to use it. The real result was systematic injustice. It was a modern day witch hunt which the subsequent Waterhouse Enquiry, which Webster regards as a "judicial disaster", failed to recognise, still less discover the truth which Webster so painstakingly uncovered.

I disagree with Webster's correlation of moral panic with the "continuing reverence for the idea of evil" which he considers is "not only unreal" but "part of a fantasy of righteousness which has been encouraged by the Judaeo-Christian tradition over a period of centuries." Using this analysis he suggests that "we disown and deny our own sexual and satanic impulses and attribute them to others" then licence ourselves to indulge such fantasies with ferocious condemnation of the supposed evil conspiracy.

In the case of Bryn Estyn was not the idea of evil which created the moral panic but the inability of human beings (individually and collectively) to identify or recognise objective reality. This failure was not motivated by the concept of evil but by personal pride, jealousy, untruths, lack of professional detatchment, vanity and willful myopia. The capacity of human beings to place themselves at the centre of a mythical world of their own creation is not necessarily tied up with the concept of evil. Yet such disagreement pales into insignificance against the damage done to society during this irrational affair.

We should never forget that facts remain sacred, opinion comes at a cost. In a free society people need to use their intellect to distinguish between one and the other. The real Secret of Bryn Estyn (ruthlessly exposed by Webster's brilliant and enduring work) was that on this occasion they did not. Everyone should read this book to make sure it never happens again. Unquestionably five stars for this investigative classic. Buy it, read it. Your trust of those in authority will never be the same again.

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